Internship

The mandatory internship is an essential part of your studies. Though it is scheduled for the second semester you can do it whenever you want throughout your studies. Just make sure you complete it before the begin of your master thesis. Students are encouraged to do an internship in industry related to the topics of Distributed Systems Engineering. However, students may also choose among various labs (Komplexpraktikum) that are offered at the faculty of computer science.

We recommend not to start with the internship before you completed all mandatory modules. Moreover, we strongly recommend to do the internship in a company. Why? You should learn about real-life engineering aspects that cannot be taught in whole at universities. Real-life projects include large teams, code styling, complex code versioning, code reviews, architecture discussions, and so on... This cannot be accomplished by a simple university lab.

Industry Internship

For the industry internship you need to find a company to work for. In general, the field of that company should be closely related to the topics covered in the degree program Distributed Systems Engineering. Apart from that there are no further restrictions on the company. Finding a company is a task of your own – you may ask lecturers for some tips, but they won't establish contacts. Later on you also need to find a job on your own.

Starting in winter term 2022/23 the procedure for industry internship slightly changed! We now provide templates for the registration of internships (or recognition of internships done in the past but during your studies). The companies won't be required to issue a confirmation that you completed your internship but will have to use a template provided by the university. Additionally, per default the degree program coordinator will now be the supervisor for all industry internships unless you want to have someone else as a supervisor.

Registration of an Industry Internship

Ahead of your internship you are requested to register the Internship module with the examination office. Therefore, please fill the registration form and tick Anmeldung on the first page (in the headline). Fill all the blanks including the task description. Please double check that also page 3 was automatically filled with the correct pieces of information.

After that, please submit the (ideally digitally) signed registration form to your supervisor (e.g. ) who is requested to check your registration, sign it, and send it back to you. Make sure that your signed registration is eventually forwarded to the examination office! After you received a confirmation from the examination office (you can also check SELMA for updates) you can start working.

Internship Report & Proof of Work Experience

After the internship, please get a signature from your company supervisor on page 3 of the form sheet and prepare an internship report (about 5 - 10 pages) describing your  tasks. A suitable outline for your report could look like the following:

• Introduction
  • What was the internship about? (Task, Problem Statement, Challenges, etc.)
  • What was the motivation for your internship task?
• Project Overview
  • What systems / technologies / toolchains did you work on?
  • What was the problem you had to solve?
  • What was the task and the goal of your project?
• Internship Tasks
  • Which approach did you follow to solve the problem? (Describe your concept!)
  • Which tasks did you fulfil to solve the problem? (Milestones, Building Blocks, etc.)
• Experiences
  • Which experiences did you gather during your internship?
  • Which technologies did you work with?
  • Which new concepts did you learn about?
• Conclusion
  • What is the final outcome of your internship?
  • How do you assess your solution in relation to the initial goals?

Make sure that your contributions are clearly described in terms of what problems you tackled, how the problems were solved and what results were produced. 

After you completed the internship report, submit it along with page 3 (company supervisor's signature!) of the form sheet to the university supervisor and wait for feedback. Please note that it may take up to eight weeks to receive feedback.

Recognition of an Industry Internship

Exceptionally, it is possible to have the internship recognized retroactively, provided it was completed during the course of study. Therefore, please also fill the registration form as described above but tick Anerkennung instead and sign the document. Unlike before, you have to get the signature from your company supervisor (page 3 of the form sheet) before you submit the form sheet, along with your internship report, to the  degree program coordinator who is your university supervisor in charge in this particular case. Your supervisor will proofread the report and forward your documents to the examination office.

University Lab

Sometimes it might not be possible to do an industry internship, which is why there is an alternative way to complete the internship module in case you are not able to do an industry internship. In that special case you have to do one (or two) university labs (Komplexpraktikum / Forschungspraktikum). Therefore you navigate to MoLe Web, click through the system until you find the module INF-DSE-20-M-INT and check which labs are offered in the current semester. Next, contact the lecturers of your interest and see what they can offer. Please note that topics are limited and you might not get a task! Please also do never contact several lecturers at once - tasks are often very individual and cost the lecturers certain amount of time to prepare! Thus, contact the lecturer with the topics you are most interested in and wait for his/her answer. Then proceed.

What you need to do in these labs is totally up to the lecturer. You'll receive a certificate in the end. Once you completed 8 SWS of university labs you can hand them in for the Internship module.